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University of Gerogia & 7 Stages presents:
Hamletmachine
By Heiner Müller
Directed by Del Hamilton
03/14/2007 - 03/18/2007
PERFORMANCE TIMES
Thursday - Saturday 8pm, Sunday 2pm
TICKET PRICING
$15 adults, $12 students, seniors over 65, and educators
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ABOUT THE PLAY
Heiner Müller, Germany's great post-modern playwright, reacts to the political collapse of post-WWII Eastern Europe in this retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The political collapse echoed for him in the psychological collapse of Prince Hamlet as he struggles to cope with the murder of his father and wedding of his mother to the apparent murderer, now king of Denmark. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, as Hamlet says, and Müller offers a graphic image of a world rotting from the inside out, ecology mimicking the political state, in a downward spiral to the next Ice Age.
This production of Hamletmachine is novel in its use of dramatic media to create a virtual actor, pal.Hamlet, who shares the character of Hamlet with real-life actor Norman Ferguson, member of the Graduate Acting Company in UGA’s Department of Theatre and Film Studies. Ferguson spent considerable time in a motion-capture lab for this production, since the pal.Hamlet character is based on his body and voice. |
Dramaturgy Note
While Heiner Müller's script is only approximately eight pages in length, it is perhaps one of the richest texts in the history of theater. Written over a period of three decades, it is influenced heavily by Müller’s geo-political background, the death of his wife, Inge, and of course, the impetus for the text, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. However, Müller infuses his text with references and ideas from individuals including Walter Benjamin, Boris Pasternak, Randall Jarrell, Dostoyevsky, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Touching on a multiplicity of themes from questions of gender to concerns about the relationship of man and nature, to the destructive and redemptive powers of technology, the text of Hamletmachine is meant to act as a framework for the cast and crew to highlight what they feel are the most relevant of those issues.
Thankfully, Müller supplies enough material to allow for thousands of versions of this show, each as relevant, thoughtful and unique as the man who wrote it.
—Vanessa "V" Ford Dramaturg
Notes from the Designers
Scenic
Designing the scenery for this production of Hamletmachine has been both a blessing and a curse. On one hand there was so much freedom to create and on the other there were many added demands due to the extensive use of media. It would take much more than the small space I am allowed here to explain all of the symbolism in the scenery. On top of the time and space restriction, it would also betray one of the underlying concepts of the production. The space is built from many images deconstructed and slammed together into a kind of three-dimensional collage or sculpture. It was an extremely satisfying and truly inspiring design experiences I have ever experienced. I hope that you enjoy the show as much as I enjoyed designing it.
— Christopher M. Waller,
Scenic Designer
Lighting
This show is truly a blank canvas for a lighting designer. With a wonderful group of people, I tried to create a new world; Hamlet’s world. One blended of flesh and machine; blood and electricity. Its a world of the imagination so let yours fly and enjoy the show.
— Rachel Konieczny,
Lighting Designer
Costumes
In this paragraph I will not explain the various symbols that pop up in my design because to do so is against the intent of the playwright and to tell the truth, I’m not sure I know myself. Hamletmachine is one of my favorite plays, as a designer, for just this reason—it does not tell you what to think, and, unlike Beckett, images are not prescribed. Also unlike in traditional drama, you don’t take the usual "logic walk" with the characters onstage; you’re left to your own devices to intuitively decipher the mess onstage. As a member of a production team, that frees me to intuitively design the spectacular mess for everyone to enjoy. So please enjoy...and tell me what you think...
—Emily Gill,
Costume Designer
Sound
As a composer and a poet I am deeply interested in the use of process, procedure, and appropriation–the cut-up, the pastiche, the ruination, the mash-up, I Ching and the like. Art as algorithm and the inverse. Therefore, working on this project was of extreme interest for me, as most, if not all, of Müller’s script is appropriative in nature, and that which isn’t sounds as if it is. I attempted to duplicate this linguistic process in an aural setting, complementing fractured word, fractured ego with fractured sound. My tools were digital–nearly everything you hear in this play is a manipulated sample or loop from some other source. The two original pieces you hear are not my own–they are the works of two other local composer/producers, Brantley Jones and Cornel Novac.
— Jordan Dalton,
Sound Designer
Media
Since Kapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. introduced the word "robot" into our consciousness, we’ve been alternately fascinated by and terrified of the idea of the intelligent machine. We are on the verge of a new era: the Post-Human, as technology increasingly permeates our lives. The line between "man" and "machine" is getting increasingly blurry. As our Hamlet says, "I want to be a machine" ... but what does this involve? Our digital character, jokingly dubbed "pal.Hamlet," embodies this impulse and this fear. What does the Post-Human look like? Ask Ray Kurzweil, or N. Katherine Hayles. As Donna Haraway claims, "We are all already cyborg."
— Michelle Mills Smith,
Media Director
Video Montage
The video montage is much like a view into the global subconcious of the characters and events in the play. The montage is a collage of video images that illustrate specific events and situations. The images exist in the world of the characters much like a dream in which sometimes the characters notice it and sometimes they do not. At times, the video montage represents virtual scenery that moves from the diegetic (i.e. the video exists in the world of the characters) to non-diegetic. At other moments, the video montage represents an emotional sensation. Overall, the element is one of a changing landscape that weaves together multiple layers of symbols and emotions.— Michelle Dodson,
Video Montage Designer
Exploring the Depths: References in Hamletmachine
Elektra.
In Greek mythology, Clytemnestra killed her husband Agamemnon upon his return from the Trojan War, having been seduced by his kinsman Aegisthus. Daughter Electra mourns her father, and incites her brother Orestes to avenge the death by killing Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Sigmund Freud, founder of modern psychoanalysis, coined the term "Oedipus complex" for a male’s unconscious desire for his mother (including jealousy of the father and an unconscious death-wish toward him); Carl Jung calls the female counterpart the "Electra complex."
The Sphinx.
Or more precisely in this case, the androsphinx, is a being with the body of a lion and the head of a human being. In Greek mythology, the androsphinx is a demon of destruction and bad luck. She is the creature who asks the riddle "Which creature in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?", strangling all who fail to answer correctly.
Squeaky Fromme.
The last line of the play is a direct quote from this member of the Charles Manson "Family", who in 1975 attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford. Müller himself stated that "I found it interesting that the Manson family was the pragmatic, unideological, puritan, Christian, variant of European terrorism in the USA. And I mean 'puritan' as of the origins, only a puritan-oriented society can produce such extremes. I believe the sentence contains a truth which wasn’t necessarily known to that girl."
Inge Müller.
Heiner Müller’s wife. She attempted to kill herself in many ways, including those mentioned in the play, before succeeding in 1966.
Raskolnikov.
The protagonist of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. From the Russian raskolnik, or divided, Raskolnikov believes himself a "superhuman" yet is unable to maintain this façade as guilt over the murders he has committed convinces him of his mediocrity.
Pest in Buda.
In 1956, Hungarians citizens fought to gain their independence from the Soviet Union. More than 3,000 protestors, many no older than 13 or 14, were killed in the streets of Budapest during the two week revolution. After the revolution, thousands of Hungarian citizens were forced to flee or face retribution from the Soviet regime.
Angelus Novus
"There is a painting called Angelus Novus by Paul Klee. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees on single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm."
—Walter Benjamin, from "On the Concept of History" 1940
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th' imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighting delight and dole,
Taken to wife.
—Claudius, Hamlet, I.ii.8-14
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to the black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
— Randall Jarrell, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
—TS Eliot, from "Ash Wednesday"
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
— TS Eliot, from "The Journey of the Magi"
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